Saturday, 3 September 2016

Remember 9/11??

In a few days the anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, and no doubt the babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, will spew out its usual avalanche of phoney patriotism, aiming to get all and sundry beating their patriotic chests. This comment in no way detracts from the suffering of those involved in that tragic event. The Western imperialist states’ response to this tragedy was, the “war on terror”, which spawned a continuous series of brutal wars, that are still to this day, shedding the blood of thousands of innocent people. All the wars that arose from the “war on terror”, are still ongoing, with the devastating consequences to people, villages, towns, cities and countries across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. The “war on terror” was the West’s attempt to reassert its power and control over that region, for no other reason than its oil under the soil.
However, the 9/11 that the babbling brook of bullshit will not give much, if any cover to, will be the tragedy of September 11th. 1973. This was the brutal overthrow of the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, by the butcher of the Chilean people, General Augusto Pinochet, let's not forget, he was a deeply religious man, who acted with the backing of US president Nixon.

The presidential palace was bombed, Allende committed “suicide” and there followed the usual fascist public burning of books, brutal torture, savage repression and disappearings. More than 200,000 Chileans went into exile, their lives destroyed by the savagery of the regime. Thousands of Pinochet’s political opponents were murdered, thousands of others ended up being tortured while held indefinitely in detention centres. Such was the savagery of the Pinochet regime that more and more states across the world started to distance themselves from his brutality. Even the US government of President Carter started to distance itself from this butcher, of course we all know that Margaret Thatcher loved him. Over his 16 years of savage power hugging, Pinochet shed the blood of countless thousands of the citizens of Chile. That is the 9/11 that will be to the fore of my thoughts when that date comes round once again. Though the New York 9/11 was a tragic event, it is dwarfed by the 9/11 of Chile, more deaths, more brutality, 16 years of ongoing torture and repression, backed by the so called democratic free West.

8 comments:

Poem number 9. I got home last night to hear that Margaret Thatcher had died. I have many memories of her time as British Prime Minister. I remember marching in a student protest in the streets of London against her. I also remember her closeness to General Pinochet, a man responsible for the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of his own people, including women and children. She ‘took tea’ with the man on several occasions.

This piece is rough and raw and jagged, and will be worked on some more when ‘poem a day’ is over. But sometimes rough, raw and jagged fits the bill.

Margaret Thatcher Takes Tea with Mr. Pinochet

How do you take your tea Mr. Pinochet?Assam or Pekoe, green or Earl Grey?Do you take milk and sugar, do you like china cups?When you’re torturing children, how many lumps?

How do you take your tea Mr. Pinochet?A pot, a diffuser, in bags, please just say?Do you like a tea strainer, do you need more hot water?When you kidnap and murder, do you slurp from the saucer?

How do you take your tea Mr. Pinochet?Full, strong, and dark, pale or halfway?Do you dip in a biscuit, a Marie or gingers?When your soldiers rape women, do you eat lady fingers?

How do you take your tea Mr. Pinochet?Please stay for dinner? We have a buffet.With all sorts of meats, spare ribs and jugged hare.When you burn a dead body, is the flesh very rare?

Mr. Pinochet, how do you take your tea?Sit back and relax, you’re safe here with me.

"Thatcher was responsible for the destruction of communities and the decimation of industry, sending in troops and police to beat the unions into submission. She openly played the race card, promoting the view that Britain was ‘swamped’ with immigrants, and sent her police force to harass and attack black communities until the inner-cities burned. She backed police corruption at Hillsborough, attacking Liverpool fans for the deaths of their children. She called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, but funded Pol Pot and welcomed Augusto Pinochet to tea, ignoring the untold people tortured and killed in Cambodia and Chile. To win an election she jumped on the chance to go to war with Argentina, leaving the blood of teenage soldiers on the shores of the Falklands.

The woman who did all this is not worthy of respect, not even in death. She has no right to be buried with honours, as she had no honour, no decency, no honesty and no compassion. We will not forget her crimes. We will not allow the glorification of Thatcher to go unchallenged.

And this is about more than one woman. Beyond her individual crimes, Thatcher was part of something much bigger, a tide of rampant free market capitalism that is still tearing our world to pieces. Thatcher, Reagan, Bush, Blair, Cameron, Obama and the rest are the cheerleaders for capitalism, a system of greed and destruction that causes austerity, war, poverty, and crisis."

Even after the Cold War was over, in 1999, when Pinochet was detained in London on charges of human rights abuses, Thatcher denounced his arrest as "unjust and callous" and praised him for "bringing democracy to Chile."

Despite similar grave human rights abuses, General Suharto of Indonesia - who murdered 500,000 suspected communists following his 1965 military coup - won accolades from Margaret Thatcher. She hailed him as "one of our very best and most valuable friends" and never spoke out against his arrest and detention of journalists, students and human rights defenders. Far from objecting to the military occupation of unfree East Timor and West Papua, she sold Jakarta weapons that were used to suppress the people there. Hundreds of thousands were killed.

Margaret Thatcher may have talked about freedom but too often she colluded with tyrants and torturers, in the name of stopping communism. For the victims of these anti-democratic regimes, they never saw any evidence that she cared about their freedom.

The regimes she did business with were sometimes as harsh and unfree as the communist alternative she loathed and was determined to prevent. Her ideas of freedom were contradictory. She was intolerant of communist tyranny but relaxed about dealing with anti-communist tyrants.

Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy was first and foremost driven by a hatred of communism, not by a love of freedom.

The catalogue of collusion and backroom dealings between the Western despots like Thatcher, and and the savage dictators of the world is written in history, we should always do our utmost to bring it into public view and seek justice for our people.We must never forget or forgive.